On Fri, 06 Oct 2006 22:19:10 +0900, Ruby Quiz wrote:
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> by Martin DeMello
>
> A pangram is a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet at least once (a
> famous example in English being "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog").
> For maximum style points a pangram should read smoothly, and have both as few
> repeated letters as possible (ideally zero), and as few words as possible.
>
> This quiz extends the idea to the posix utilities[1] - write a program to find
> pangrammatic collections of posix utilities that (1) use the fewest utilities
> and (2) have the minimum number of repeated letters. In either case, break ties
> on the other criterion; that is, your first solution should also have as few
> repeated letters as possible, and your second one should use as few utilities as
> possible.
>
> [1] http://www.unix.org/version3/apis/cu.html has a complete list
Finding the pangram with the minimum number of words is NP-Hard. The
reduction is from Minimum Set Cover[1]:
MINIMUM SET COVER:
INSTANCE: Collection C of subsets of a finite set S.
SOLUTION: A set cover for S, i.e., a subset C' of C such that
every element in S belongs to at least one member of C'.
MEASURE: Cardinality of the set cover, i.e., size(C')
Reduction:
Each element in S becomes mapped to a unique letter in the alphabet used
by pangrams. (Note that in general, we can play Pangrams in any
langauage, the alphabet can be of length we want) Each subset K (which is
an element of C) becomes a word, made up of the letters corresponding to
the elements of K. Finding a pangram with the minimum number of words in
this setup would give a solution to the set-cover instance.
I suspect that the other optimization problem here may also be NP-Hard.
I'm not sure (in all of the 5 minutes that I'm writing this post) how to do
a simple reduction to that problem though.
--Ken Bloom
[1] http://www.ensta.fr/~diam//ro/online/viggo_wwwcompendium/node146.html
--
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
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